from the we-can-just-ignore-laws-now? dept
Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that “emergency” keeps getting 75-day extensions.
Trump is reportedly about to hit the snooze button on TikTok enforcement for the third time, extending a deadline that was supposedly so urgent that Congress had to rush through legislation ignoring basic First Amendment protections. This will be the third extension since January — which should tell you everything about how “urgent” this national security threat actually was.
With a mid-June deadline approaching and trade talks with China in limbo, Trump is expected to sign an executive order staving off enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app, according to people familiar with his plan.
It would be the third extension since Trump took office in January. The current one expires June 19.
The pattern here is obvious: Biden championed the ban, then refused to enforce it on his way out the door. Trump promised to fix everything with a deal in 75 days, then extended that deadline when China predictably balked. Now he’s extending it again, treating federal law like a negotiating chip he can deploy when convenient.
Want proof this was never really about national security? When Trump spoke with Xi Jinping this week about trade — you know, the perfect opportunity to address this supposed existential threat — TikTok didn’t even come up.
Trump spoke by phone on Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping amid a breakdown in trade negotiations. The two leaders agreed that their teams would hold a new round of trade talks soon. The Chinese team is led by Vice Premier He Lifeng. The U.S. would be represented by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Trump said.
TikTok didn’t come up on the call Thursday, according to a Trump administration official.
If TikTok really posed the kind of national security risk that justified circumventing the First Amendment (which the Supreme Court said was only justified based on the supposed severity of the threat), wouldn’t it be a priority in direct talks with the Chinese president? Instead, it’s apparently not worth mentioning.
But, also, even if the entire law weren’t a moral panic smokescreen, we have a more fundamental problem: in a country where the rule of law is functioning, presidents don’t get to selectively ignore federal laws via executive order. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to work. But Trump is doing exactly that — and worse, he’s using the threat of future enforcement as leverage to engineer his preferred outcome.
I know that Trump is making a mockery of the Constitution in so many different ways right now, but it doesn’t mean that this particular attack on it should be ignored.
The TikTok saga has become a perfect case study in how moral panics work: manufacture urgency, rush through bad legislation, then quietly let it fade when the political winds shift. The only difference here is that the law is still on the books, being wielded like a sword of Damocles over a platform that hosts American speech.
We called this nonsense from the beginning, and every snooze button press proves us right. The real threat to American democracy isn’t kids posting dance videos — it’s politicians who treat the rule of law like a game show where they get to pick which laws to enforce based on what plays well on any given day.
Filed Under: donald trump, enforcement, moral panic, tiktok ban
Companies: tiktok
